5 ms·

Disclaimer: I have slightly skimmed the article and I don't exactly know what your usage of the word 'copyright' implies. I am making this post anyway because

Disclaimer: I have slightly skimmed the article and I don't exactly know what your usage of the word 'copyright' implies. I am making this post anyway because I think you'll benefit from these links I mentioned in an earlier post. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591253 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591253

Silhouette 14y ago
Please don't mistake the fact that I didn't bother debunking each individual point from the article here on Hacker News for either ignorance or apathy with regard to IP laws. I'm well aware of the opposing point of view and the common arguments made in its favour. I just haven't yet seen any real evidence that supports the kind of absurdly generic claim made by Falkvinge in this article. And to be frank, I'm unlikely to be swayed by the kinds of pages you linked to indirectly in your reply, either, because they appear to repeat the same poorly thought out arguments as everyone else. Sure, performing musicians can make money playing live. Shame if you're a composer or lyricist or a technician in the recording studio, I guess. Sure, people can make low budget computer games and sell them for a nominal amount to an audience of geeks sympathetic to their pricing model. Shame if you want to play a AAA grade game with realistic graphics, professional quality character designs, professional quality voice acting, professional quality orchestral score, well-balanced gameplay, non-repetitive level designs, and an AI smarter than a snail, I guess. Sure, we can find plenty of pulp fiction quality self-published stories on-line for free. Shame if you need a well-structured, professionally edited textbook for your kid's math class complete with a full set of exercises, I guess. The same pattern comes up time and again in the cheap shots against copyright. Usually, the argument is either some variation of "plenty of work gets made anyway" but looking only at quantity and not quality, or some variation of "the artists can earn money by {some other model}" but without taking into account all the people who genuinely contribute to producing good work but aren't the immediate performer. And then someone comes along and points out the isolated exceptions: a handful of big name FOSS products (invariably in fields that are widely applicable and attractive to a lot of geeks, which is a tiny part of the overall software landscape, and invariably ignoring any role copyright played in the development model of those products), a couple of performers who've made money with a high profile online experiment (usually people who were already well known thanks to their earlier work funded by more traditional models), and so on. One of these days, I'd like to start a page with all the eternally repeated examples in this context and try to figure out how many of them there really are and what proportion of their overall industries they actually represent. Alas, since no-one is going to pay me for that work, I had better go back to building my copyright-protected company where the revenues do go straight to the handful of people who are putting in huge amounts of hard work to do things no-one has ever done before, which apparently doesn't exist in Falkvinge's mind because we're all under 40.
- EvanAnderson 14y ago
  I'd make a blanket response to your "Shame if you..." points as follows: Maybe those ships have sailed and society has no need of those things anymore. If society needs those things it will find a way to pay for them. If it can't, it doesn't need them. An industry's failure to create a sustainable business model in the face of the reality that technology has created isn't a failing of the technology. It would be nice if business would just optimize for reality instead of trying (and repeatedly failing) to bend reality through legislation.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    If society needs those things it will find a way to pay for them. If it can't, it doesn't need them. I don't accept your premise. The situation is too similar to a tragedy of the commons, with a large dose of ignorance mixed in: most people outside the creative industries have no idea how much hard work by how many different kinds of people ultimately contributes to that smash hit music recording or novel or computer game. They just think of it as the latest track from $singer or the latest book from $author/$publisher or the latest game from $studio. Take a look at how long the credits are the next time you watch a blockbuster movie that you enjoy, and see how many of the job titles you even understand. Unless you work in the movies, it will probably be a small minority, yet without all the others you probably wouldn't have enjoyed the movie nearly so much, assuming it even existed. The trouble is, a lot of people have got used to two conflicting views in recent years: we expect ever higher creative values in works (which come with a higher sunk cost to produce the work initially) and yet we see that we can redistribute them cheaply and quickly (which implies a marginal cost near zero). If you don't have copyright, or some other economic tool, to amortise the huge sunk cost over a similarly huge audience, then you can't afford to make the work in the first place and the fact that the marginal cost of physical reproduction/redistribution is now near zero doesn't help you.
    - njs12345 14y ago
      Can you explain why a patronage model is unable to solve these problems?

Silhouette 14y ago

Please don't mistake the fact that I didn't bother debunking each individual point from the article here on Hacker News for either ignorance or apathy with regard to IP laws. I'm well aware of the opposing point of view and the common arguments made in its favour. I just haven't yet seen any real evidence that supports the kind of absurdly generic claim made by Falkvinge in this article. And to be frank, I'm unlikely to be swayed by the kinds of pages you linked to indirectly in your reply, either, because they appear to repeat the same poorly thought out arguments as everyone else. Sure, performing musicians can make money playing live. Shame if you're a composer or lyricist or a technician in the recording studio, I guess. Sure, people can make low budget computer games and sell them for a nominal amount to an audience of geeks sympathetic to their pricing model. Shame if you want to play a AAA grade game with realistic graphics, professional quality character designs, professional quality voice acting, professional quality orchestral score, well-balanced gameplay, non-repetitive level designs, and an AI smarter than a snail, I guess. Sure, we can find plenty of pulp fiction quality self-published stories on-line for free. Shame if you need a well-structured, professionally edited textbook for your kid's math class complete with a full set of exercises, I guess. The same pattern comes up time and again in the cheap shots against copyright. Usually, the argument is either some variation of "plenty of work gets made anyway" but looking only at quantity and not quality, or some variation of "the artists can earn money by {some other model}" but without taking into account all the people who genuinely contribute to producing good work but aren't the immediate performer. And then someone comes along and points out the isolated exceptions: a handful of big name FOSS products (invariably in fields that are widely applicable and attractive to a lot of geeks, which is a tiny part of the overall software landscape, and invariably ignoring any role copyright played in the development model of those products), a couple of performers who've made money with a high profile online experiment (usually people who were already well known thanks to their earlier work funded by more traditional models), and so on. One of these days, I'd like to start a page with all the eternally repeated examples in this context and try to figure out how many of them there really are and what proportion of their overall industries they actually represent. Alas, since no-one is going to pay me for that work, I had better go back to building my copyright-protected company where the revenues do go straight to the handful of people who are putting in huge amounts of hard work to do things no-one has ever done before, which apparently doesn't exist in Falkvinge's mind because we're all under 40.

EvanAnderson 14y ago
I'd make a blanket response to your "Shame if you..." points as follows: Maybe those ships have sailed and society has no need of those things anymore. If society needs those things it will find a way to pay for them. If it can't, it doesn't need them. An industry's failure to create a sustainable business model in the face of the reality that technology has created isn't a failing of the technology. It would be nice if business would just optimize for reality instead of trying (and repeatedly failing) to bend reality through legislation.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  If society needs those things it will find a way to pay for them. If it can't, it doesn't need them. I don't accept your premise. The situation is too similar to a tragedy of the commons, with a large dose of ignorance mixed in: most people outside the creative industries have no idea how much hard work by how many different kinds of people ultimately contributes to that smash hit music recording or novel or computer game. They just think of it as the latest track from $singer or the latest book from $author/$publisher or the latest game from $studio. Take a look at how long the credits are the next time you watch a blockbuster movie that you enjoy, and see how many of the job titles you even understand. Unless you work in the movies, it will probably be a small minority, yet without all the others you probably wouldn't have enjoyed the movie nearly so much, assuming it even existed. The trouble is, a lot of people have got used to two conflicting views in recent years: we expect ever higher creative values in works (which come with a higher sunk cost to produce the work initially) and yet we see that we can redistribute them cheaply and quickly (which implies a marginal cost near zero). If you don't have copyright, or some other economic tool, to amortise the huge sunk cost over a similarly huge audience, then you can't afford to make the work in the first place and the fact that the marginal cost of physical reproduction/redistribution is now near zero doesn't help you.
  - njs12345 14y ago
    Can you explain why a patronage model is unable to solve these problems?